According to various signs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), he wants to meet "White Asian and Latina women with big butts" to give him money, be his sex slaves and/or help him with Things. And he offers some unique selling points in return; he claims that he looks like Michael Jackson on the Thriller album and Barack Obama, once made $5,000 in 5 hours and has sold 109 copies of two books he has written. More interestingly, while his signs are all carefully hand-lettered, with neat primary-school handwriting, he has borrowed one technique from Web 2.0 practices; each sign is topped and tailed with a tag cloud of his various diverse interests, often in bizarre juxtapositions and bearing no relation to the content:

Of course, the question remains of who's behind this, and what their motivation is. Is it a viral campaign for an upcoming TV show or a brand of shoes? Some prankster self-consciously mashing up Wesley Willis, Hopkin Green Frog and Hello My Future Girlfriend to "freak the mundanes" and/or inject a bit of surreality into the urban environment? Or is there really some lonely guy who's keen on big-bottomed ladies and is convinced that what women really want is a Michael Jackson lookalike who's into rap, chess and Bob Marley, has written two books and whose father was in a movie?

The all-day and into-the-night annual affair, held at Hansen Dam (this year's on July 26), begins with a mass morning blessing by a Catholic priest, who then goes car to car, blessing each individually. Some people also ask him put holy water in their radiators.

With the Shag title art and copious numbers of scantily-clad vixens in photos, I suspect it's not an official Catholic Church-sponsored event. I wonder where exactly it falls in the ironic/sincere spectrum.
(via MeFi)

The south-east Asian country of Laos has done the equivalent of selling the spare kidney for much-needed dollars and
sold its Internet domain to Los Angeles. Under the deal, which has been approved by ICANN, the cultural capital of McWorld is now the first city to have its own top-level domain; consequently, there are now domains such as arnie.la and madonna.la.

I've noticed that neither .lo nor .ny are actual TLDs; perhaps if this sets a precedent, London and New York can snap those up and use them to merchandise their cultural capital.

¡Oye Esteban!
Miserablist pop star par excellence Morrissey has become
a cult figure among
young Latinos in Los Angeles, and nobody quite knows why.
Morrissey's new fans aren't mopey white suburban kids (no, those have rap-metal and industriogoth to angst along to), but marginalised Mexican youth in the space between Hispanic and anglo-American culture but not quite belonging to either. And thus, tattooed, macho homeboys openly cry along to Smiths songs, whilst refusing to believe that Morrissey might be gay.

"Some nights I lay in my bedroom and I listen to 'There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,' and I cry," he tells me. "I cry and cry and cry. I cry like a little bitch, man."

"People are always asking me if I'm gay because I have a photo of Morrissey hugging Johnny Marr," says Alex Diaz, a 16-year-old Smiths fanatic who plans on joining the marines when he's old enough. "My friends always ask me, 'Why do you like these queers?' But, you know, he's probably just bisexual. His songs aren't all about guys. Look at 'Girlfriend in a Coma'--that's about a girl. I think there probably would be some people who'd hate it if Morrissey ever came out and said he was gay, but, personally, I don't really care. And like I said, he's probably bisexual."

Mind you, the few remaining aging anaemic, besweatered wallflowers from the 1980s who haven't grown out of their Smiths phase don't quite know what to make of the new Morrissey fan subculture, one which they are as much outsiders in as they were back in high school:

"People have actually said to me, 'You like Morrissey? That's weird for a white guy.' And I find that completely bizarre," Hensley tells me, momentarily dropping his veil of irony for a grain of semi-sincere annoyance. "Most of the other people here wouldn't even know who Jarvis Cocker is. They only like Morrissey. We just came here to make fun of people."

One year ago:

2017/11/15

LGBT+ Australians and their allies can breathe a cautious sigh of relief as one prolonged chapter of the national culture-war pantomime comes to a close, with
61.6% of Australians voting to legalise same-sex marriage .

Two years ago:

2016/11/14

As the US counts down the days to the inauguration of President Trump, some voices in the technology industry are calling for the industry to start scrubbing user data , before the new government's surveillance apparatus

Five years ago:

2013/11/5

I am back in Reykjavík, Iceland; this time, I came here on occasion of Kraftwerk playing a gig at the Harpa concert hall. Having missed out on tickets to see them in New York (when they